First, the relationships are all "bidirectional", which really clutters the visualisation. In Neo4j, relationships are always directed, which kind of makes it awkward to store these bi-directional relationships like this.

Of course, this graph was originally made by De Standaard newspaper in Flanders, Belgium, so therefore it was created in Dutch. A couple of the key concepts though (type of node, status of the node) would be easily and meaningfully translated for you to have any fun with the dataset.

The graph was not "labeled", and therefore lacked some essential structural elements that would allow for fun manipulation in the Neo4j Browser.

The relationships did not really say anything about the type of relationship.

Monday, 28 November 2016

November 13th, 2015 - A day to remember

Just over two weeks ago, we remembered the sad anniversary of one of the most atrocious and vile terrorist attachs that our generation has seen. It's easy to forget many things in our daily rat race, but I don't think I will easily forget this video, which was all over the internet hours/days after the attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris:

All it takes is a drop of empathy and humanity to understand the horror that these victims went through. The sound of the one person shouting "Oscar .... Oscar... Oscar..." just keeps on ringing through my head.

Friday, 25 November 2016

The interview below was long overdue - but very much worth the wait. For the past couple of years, the Neo4j community has been brewing on a really interesting add-on capability to integrate GIS-style, spatial querying capabilities into Neo4j. It's such a great and natural fit - and one of the driving forces behind this in the community has always been this global citizen called Craig Taverner. Craig has been in the ecosystem for years - first as a community member, then as a commercial customer, and now as an employee in Neo's Swedish engineering team. So about time we had a chat:

Here's the transcript of our conversation:

RVB: 00:02.785 Hello everyone. My name is Rik, Rik Van Bruggen from Neo Technology, and here we are again, recording another Neo4j Graphistania podcast session. And today I'm joined by one of my colleagues actually, in the Neo4j engineering team, Craig Taverner. Hi Craig.

Wednesday, 16 November 2016

Oh man - things are heating up in the graph space, and keeping me super busy. After announcing our Series D last week (read more over here) I barely found the chance to publish this interview with Evelina Gabasova about graphs, Star Wars and biotech. Listen or read the full interview below.

Here's the transcription of our conversation:

RVB: 00:03.805 Hello, everyone. My name is Rik - Rik Van Bruggen from Neo Technology, and here we are again. It's been a while. We're recording another episode of our Neo4j Graphistania podcast, and today I have a wonderful lady from the beautiful lands around Cambridge, on the other side of this Skype call. And that's Evelina Gabasova. Hello, Evelina.